We have a full plate of industry news for you today, Dear Reader. CDP CleverTap has raised a $35 million Series C, bringing their total funding to $76 million. CleverTap positions itself as an “AI-powered customer lifecycle and user retention platform” with a focus on mobile users. Waxing less poetic, we would put it our “campaign CDP” category.
Microsoft has quietly beaten Salesforce and Adobe to market with a Customer Data Platform under the label of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. It seems to tick all the boxes for a proper CDP, including support for all data types, persistent storage, and open access. It also includes self-service capabilities and built in analytics. It’s available now with prices starting at $1,500 per month.
Consumers who really care about privacy can already use the Brave browser, which lets them opt in to receive ads and then direct the payment to Web sites they visit. Less altruistic users can now direct the payments to their own account through Brave’s new alliance with digital money platform Uphold. Receiving the payments does require giving up their anonymity, which isn’t otherwise required with Brave.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.